Psychohistorical Crisis

25

THE MARTYR'S CACHE, 14,791 GE

The Yani-Hotle fragment; recently deciphered by the Archaeologist Boeluki, entices us with the suggestion that the first man to rocket from the Prime Planet and live to walk on another planet was named Neel Halmstrun, but we do not know how many hairs he had under his left armpit and we cannot find out because that information has, by now, been lost among the quantum uncertainties of multiple possible yesterdays, none tagged by the laws of physics as the ^l,one true past—a unique computable past being as meaningless a concept as an absolute frame of reference.

A caterpillar on the leaf of a tree can climb down to the base of the tree with a simple set of instructions, but should he attempt to reclimb the tree, to find the leaf upon which he was born, a mere reversal of those instructions will not suffice to return him home. Reversal is a process which requires more information than is needed by time-symmetry.

Without information conservation, a perfectly time-symmetric physics will not imply reversibility: / would be willing to apply psychohistory to the reconstruction of the past, to any level of resolution, were you to gift me one additional tool. In setting up the boundary conditions for my equations so that they are sufficiently precise to the problem specified, one needs to be able to answer this question: given a right-angled triangle whose sides measure exactly ten Planck lengths, how do I compute the length of the hypotenuse? The answer is: you can't; the uncertainty in the length of the hypotenuse is a measure of the information you don’t have—and won’t get by posing the question to Mother Nature who disposed of such trifles during her housecleaning chores.

From the transcript of “The Fifth Speech” given by the

Founder to the Group of Forty-six at the Imperial University,

Splendid Wisdom, 12,061 GE

They had settled into their hotel room and were debating the safest way to make contact with their antique dealer when a gentle whisper in her fam told Nemia that she had received a Personal Capsule. She suspected her mother and was slightly annoyed, cracking the Capsule’s sphere in their room’s discreet communications alcove away from Hiran-imus. But it was from Eron. Once the message had been famfed, the sphere rapidly crumbled. She read from her mind’s screen:

“Nemia, I know I shouldn’t be contacting you but I just fell in a trap and thought you should know. I got invited to a party of new students”—he inserted the address—“and the old geezer had one of your Coron’s Eggs. I checked it out to see that it held info on Zural and it did, but I was doing this in front of everybody and had to do such a fast sleight-of-hand that I couldn’t get the coordinates—sorry. Then I cut and ran. Is this important? Faithfully, You-Know-Who.” Alarmed, she came to Hiranimus and famfed him the contents. Scogil assimilated the message, turning angrily to Nemia. “He should know nothing about Zural! Nothing! Did you tell him?”

“I most certainly did not!”

Hiranimus absorbed that grimly. “The contemptible little spy. He spies on everyone. And he’s good. Well, this upsets our little dance of acquaintance! They already know who we are. Not Eron’s fault. It means they are far more professional than I could have imagined. They’re good.”

“Fellowship Investigators? Shall we run?”

“They can’t be police. The police don’t think so deviously.” He laughed. “And police routines are my bright spot of expertise. If the Fellowship already knew where Zural was, they wouldn’t bother with us. They’d already be there. They have unlimited money; these people don’t.”

“What shall we do?”

“You’ve already chartered a ship for us. I don’t know how you arranged that and I don’t want to know. It’s the Oversee, I presume. They will be professionals. Can you arrange with them an escape route in case things go sour?”

“I think so.”

“Let’s check out of here. Now. We disappear. It will give us time to think. If Eron and your grandfather are right and their Egg does hold the coordinates...”

But in the hotel corridor, not five apartments from theirs, a woman approached them, followed by a slightly anxious man. She was very abrupt in her introduction. “We already know that you are not the police. You will not know as much about us. Where would you like to discuss our affairs? Your choice.” Another shock. This was an encounter that wasn’t going to be played by a preset plan. “Let’s take a random walk and decide as we go,” said Hiranimus, thinking as he continued to move, checking the exits. Nemia tried frantically to signal something, then acquiesced.

“A lovely city,” said the slightly foppish gentleman, obviously relieved that no one was pointing blasters. His body language was that of deference.

Away from the hotel, lost in a crowd drifting down a verticule from an overhead monorail station, Scogil chose a small restaurant between towers. The table he picked was surrounded by plants and there they began an intricate maneuver of conversation, testing, evaluating each other, Scogil still wary of a trap. These people were talking like malcontents— with open innocence? or as the trappings of a deliberate ruse?

He and Nemia responded cautiously to their guests’ candor. “Those are sentiments that could get you into trouble,” Scogil commented neutrally.

The effete man only smiled. “Here on abandoned Faraway? On Faraway where they have yet to accept the rule of the Pscholars enthusiastically? Here where the inner mind still dreams of the galactic chutzpah they once had?”

“Point taken. But everyone within earshot isn’t a citizen. There are tourists like us—and other farmen whose purpose is inscrutable. I hear accents.”

The alert woman smiled as if she had been listening to every conversation within twenty meters. “... no one as inscrutable as we four.”

The atmosphere relaxed. Scogil poured the woman a drink from the large carafe. She was obviously the security professional, but the man was the driven eccentric, the one with the purpose, probably the leader. His speech was uncommon but it was certainly derived from the potpourri of Splendid Wisdom dialects—three of the key lilts used by his voice occurred nowhere else. That excited Scogil; any man from Splendid Wisdom was worth cultivating for a purpose Scogil was only beginning to map out for himself.

Caution might be lulled but caution was not expendable. Artfully he bypassed the seditionist thrust of the conversation. “We’re interested in your galactarium because we are trying to locate an obscure planet in this part of the Periphery, one originally staked out in early Imperial times, then evacuated as not worth terraforming.” Smythos had said as much, noting the hundreds of ghost towns on Zural II even if only in one offhand sentence of his scribblings. “Rumor places a treasure there. We’re on a treasure hunt.”

The man abandoned his proselytizing. “Names change over the centuries. A star can easily be hidden right in front of your telescope as the sages say. Do you have any tangible numbers or descriptions we could search on?”

Scogil made the plunge. “Zural.” Nemia kicked him under the table.

“Ah.” Surprise. “And could the treasure be fifty bodies?”

He knew! “You seem familiar with that very obscure name.”

The man smiled hugely and placed his hand on Scogil’s in introduction. “I’m Hyperlord Kikaju Jama. The young lady wishes, for the moment, to remain anonymous.” The Hyperlord seemed to have lost all of his fearful doubt and was now the picture of total confidence, no longer in need of whatever expertise the young woman was providing. “I have a way of sensing certain things; in you I sense a subtie antagonism to the Pscholars, matching my own, which accounts for your interest in Zural. Indeed Zural is an obscure name. It does not occur in any of the archives of Splendid Wisdom. I was not aware of it myself until recently. I imagine it is obscure because the leaders of Faraway wished to bury and forget their crime of mass murder, and the Pscholars are ashamed of the con game in which they sent fifty of their brightest young psychohistorians to a certain and sordid death simply to make the perturbed output of their equations converge on an elegant solution. When victor and vanquished both have a passionate desire to forget something, it vanishes, and the centuries then proceed to compost whatever these ex-enemies forgot to forget. I think that in some physics text there is a law of entropy requiring every new bit of information created to overwrite an old bit. In this way it is the unattended details which get composted first.”

“Some bits survive longer than others,” said Scogil, thinking of the memoirs of that morbid recluse, Tamic Smythos, whose effects had lingered for centuries in storage before being accidentally unearthed.

“Indeed,” said Jama thinking of a spaceship wreck preserved at near-absolute zero far from the scenes of historical revision. He laughed mischievously. “Fortunately for both of us the police have never heard of Zural, either. Are you intent upon voyaging to this place?”

“It might make a nice honeymoon spot.”

“Hardly. The specs are dreary. But if you can see your way to an expedition, I can see the possibility of an alliance between our mutual avarice. But first we have an exchange to make under the auspices of the Red Sun. Not, of course, before dinner arrives.” Steaming plates were rising from the center of their table. “There will be plenty of time for troublemaking after dinner. Good food puts a queasy stomach at ease and promotes comradeship.”

The woman stayed his reaching hand. “Me first. I’m your official taster, remember?”

Kikaju Jama sighed. “It is such a bother to be paranoid!” But he waited.

Later that afternoon, suspicions surmounted, the deal was consummated. The four then proceeded to the Telomere space terminal to be transported via ferry to Nemia’s orbiting charter. It was a long trip. Crammed together in a pod and then in a low-orbit shuttle, they had good opportunity to further their trust in each other while contending with the routine distrust of other organizations with other cautious purposes. The last obstacle they faced was the charter’s bald and blunt-necked Starmaster, who personally met them at the shuttle to conduct his own thorough search of the Hyperlord and Katana for hidden mechs and nanomachines. He grunted his approval, then ferried them across space to his ship where he finally disappeared up a central shaft into the starship’s bridge, leaving them to acquaint themselves with their quarters.

The enthusiastic Hyperlord tagged after Scogil with his endless schemes as if he thought that Scogil was not a sufficiently committed anti-imperialist and needed prompting. He was full of amateur plots to overthrow a Galactic Empire that had, in his opinion, undeservedly survived the Interregnum paroxysm. Eventually Scogil had to remind him that they all needed sleep.

But the proselytizing began again in the morning. Scogil continued to humor their guest, building a friendship he intended to find a use for in the years to come. Nemia flirted with Jama, partly to stop his blathering so that her Hiran-imus could relax, partly because she was fascinated by his unctuous manners, the likes of which she had never met. She wasn’t sure whether his blatant propositions were serious or mere highly artistic twaddling. Katana was the observant one, seeming more interested in the mysterious crew of their charter than muting Jama’s excesses. The crew kept to themselves, and they saw the Starmaster only at dinner and he was not loquacious.

“Why so many jumps?” asked Scogil upon a chance meeting with the Starmaster.

“Zigzags. Routine security. We aren’t being followed but we always assume a tail.”

Within eighteen watches their jumping brought them to Zural, a dim, red star, where they spent the initial approach observing Zural II from afar and scanning the system for other ships. Zural I was barren and tidally locked; Zural III was a distant giant that had failed to become Zuml’s binary. There were no lurking ships. Satisfied of that, the Starmaster used his thrusters in a long cautious approach to their desolate destination, followed by a high-g aerobraking maneuver that dropped them into low orbit around Zural II.

From an altitude of three hundred kloms it was a forbidding world, small, with a seventy-three-hour rotation, perhaps a quarter glaciated, its eroded impact craters mostly erased by lava flows except in the high desert. The planet was at that borderline distance from its star where tidal friction begins to play with the crust, though Zural II did not seem, at the moment, to be afflicted by any active volcanoes. The atmosphere was thicker than Neuhadra’s, and from the pastel blush of the rocks had once been oxygenated by photosynthetic life, now long gone, billions of years gone, lost to who-knew-what catastrophe. Life was a common but transient phenomena on modest inner planets, most of the time not surviving for more than a billion years.

On this scrabble world humanity hadn’t been able to revive that once-verdant era. During the first five low passes their sensors picked up evidence of more than four hundred abandoned man-made sites. A quick erosion analysis suggested an age of at least ten thousand years for the failed colony—good camouflage for a more recent prison.

“Will we find it?” asked Jama anxiously.

The Starmaster grunted and continued scanning. His other crew members all seemed to be part of the analysis team and chattered among themselves. One of them turned to Jama. “It takes time.” Then he was gone.

A sophisticated algorithm gradually subtracted the oldest and the newest features from the images, leaving selected sites to be re-imaged at higher resolution. These were reiterated through the analysis until there were so few likely sites left that it made sense to send down investigation teams. The bald Starmaster was caught smiling again when the third lander brought back conclusive evidence for an old prison, abandoned to wind and snow for the last twenty-two centuries. It was built inside an old mining community on a plateau in the mountains which itself had been abandoned for ten millennia. There were glaciers crawling down the distant peaks, and patches of snow still lingered in the shady spots not reached by the feeble summer sun.

It took more time to organize a landing party, but once down the crew swiftly inflated a command bubble next to the prison, sheltered from the wind. They did not bury their gawky pressure-supported home; the atmosphere was thick enough to protect them from cosmic rays. Hiranimus soon noted that this was a party of experienced archaeologists. Within a span of watches they had cleared away the accumulated sand and laid out the operational modes of the ancient prison routine. Nemia had said nothing about their expertise. Even the old roads were swept clean down to the plasteel mesh hardpack.

No time for a honeymoon. After a decawatch of careful sifting they found the graveyard with its forty-two coffins, containing thirty skeletons and twelve leathery mummies preserved by the cold and lifelessness of Zural. No grave markers, no identification, nothing. All but one prisoner had died of old age. One blaster death. Forty-one life sentences carried out. Counting the seven whom Tamic claimed were executed before reaching Zural, all fifty martyrs were thus accounted for.

No one had been allowed to take possessions to their grave except an old woman, young once, whose arthritic finger was frozen to a single ring. That would be Tamic’s sweetheart. He had mentioned nothing about her except his gift to her of the ring at sunrise the day before he had been spirited away from Zural by the corrupt associates of a corrupt and frightened Faraway Chancellor. The Chancellor thought he needed some minor psychohistoric meddling to insure the continuance of his threatened rule. The girlfriend’s diminutive was Jan. Her surname was unknown. None of the martyrs had names, neither in the records on Splendid Wisdom nor in the archives of Faraway. Tamic himself had not bothered to record their names. But that is the fate of all men—gravestones, memoirs, memories turn to dust in time. In another billion years, even the names of the Emperors will be gone.

The Helmarian archaeologists took apart the prison ruins with meticulous care, layer by layer, looking for the fabled Martyr’s Cache. For a while they were elated when they dug into the floor and found a secret basement that must have been excavated surreptitiously by the martyrs—but there was nothing in it but a calendar etched into the wall and a crumbling table. Thousands of years ago the room had been stripped bare—by the guards or by the inmates? Who would ever know?

The dig crew, except for the busy Hyperlord, began to give up hope of finding anything. Jama’s nagging optimism became annoying to the others. Furthermore Kikaju persisted in his role as pest around the camp, and was finally declared off limits by the archaeologists, ostensibly because of the careless way he scrabbled among the ruins chasing down his hunches. He cared nothing for the laborious documentation of layers and the reverence with which each caked bolt and toothpick was dusted off and salvaged—he just wanted to find something. Rebuffed, he took his enthusiasm to the hills. And as the others grew still more discouraged, Kikaju Jama became wildly manic about the possibilities. It was his nature to wax into unrealistic optimism in the midst of gloom.

Jama discovered some of the colonial mine tunnels hacked into the mountainside above the camp. It looked like imported machinery had been in short supply, with the marks of homemade tools still everywhere in evidence. Inside the old drifts he stumbled upon fearful cave-ins, leading a sobered Hyperlord to a less dangerous reconnaissance outside. Yes, there were slumpings. Still outside, by the kind of careful dating that came as second nature to an antique dealer, Kikaju convinced himself that the most recent collapse was at least three thousand years old and the mine had long ago restabilized—and would remain stable barring a strong earthquake. That meant that if he was now denied access to a tunnel, it would also have been denied to a wandering martyr and could thus be ignored.

No one in Scogil’s party thought that the prisoners would have been allowed to wander so far—certainly not inside old mine diggings—but Jama had evidence that came with his galactarium—which he was not sharing—suggesting that some of those guarding the martyrs were corruptible, even unsympathetic with the sentence imposed upon their charges. They might have been lax. They might have turned a blind eye to an innocent walk in the hills. He reasoned that the guards of this remote prison would not be concerned about an overland escape, would not consider it even possible. There was no place to go and even if an equipped man did leave the compound, or fjnd a hiding place, he would die sooner rather than later. Intelligent guards would be watching spaceships.

Such speculation motivated the Hyperlord in his hopeful exploration of the mines. The worst blockages he faced were accumulations of squat and fat icicles. Eventually Jama built up enough courage to torch passages through die worst of them. His enthusiasm was tried. The farther he penetrated the mine, the more he became wary of the dangers of that kind of adventuring. His feet started a small rockslide. Only an instant freezing of his muscles kept him from stepping into a bottomless hole. And then, after convincing himself that he was being adequately cautious, his feet went out from under him and he was sliding, butt bouncing, flying down a steeply inclined shaft, careening off a rock that took a terrible gouge in the side. He landed on his back in a morass of mud that oozed below the frost line at the bottom of the slanting shaft.

Spacedamn! For a terrifying moment he was sure that he had lost his optimism!

Was his suit ripped? Were a sixtyne of bones broken? He was sure that he had stupidly been pushing his time limits and was low on oxygen. While he groped about to give himself a hand-up, his glove closed on an antique atomic slicer on the ledge he was trying to use as a grip. He slumped back into the mud and looked with amazement at the device now centered in his beam. It was a cheap hand tool—even crusted, obviously of an early Faraway design—the kind of tool that was common merchandise for Faraway’s aggressive independent traders. The sight refueled his enthusiasm. He lay in his mudbath of aches, grinning hugely. Just this tool alone would buy him a thousand wigs back on Splendid Wisdom!

After a mist shower at the base and a check of his bruises, which did not conceal any shattered bones, he had a talk with himself to fortify his courage, and, without telling even Katana where he was going, went right out again. The Hyperlord spend frustrating watches following his clue. Those nitpickers were excluding him from their dig—well, he would exclude them from his.

He found the Martyr’s Cache in an improbable place. It was not directly accessible from the surface, reachable only through a ratrun of tunnels, but did lay near the surface, was dry and in the frost zone. The tiny dungeon’s rock walls bore the unmistakable signature of an ancient Faraway atomic slicer, and inside the small cave was a box. He was too joyfully curious to report his find without first examining it, but he was also conscious of the razzing he had taken for not being careful and so he only took a small peek. He pried off the top of the box, and his beam showed him neat slices of fragile rock. Artificial. Human made. Carefully machined. Triumph!

Back at the hut, no one believed him when he boasted that he had located the Martyr’s Cache for which they had been sifting sand and finding only sand mixed with a few buttons. He let them razz him and have their laughs at his expense; the more they laughed, the higher they were being hoisted for their fall. Presently.. .he produced the slicing tool. He saw the joshing in stunned eyes suddenly arrested, the twinkle in them frozen by astonishment.

“There’s more, my disbelieving yokels!”

A clamor began with no one person having the verbal right of way. What they were all trying to say at the same time was that they desired to dress for a hike and hurry after him to claim his treasure—but the Hyperlord was not willing to give up his satisfying fame so quickly. He protested exhaustion and a need to rest his weary feet. He had them by rings in their noses. His worst detractor brought a footbath of warm water. Food appeared, the best they had in the tent. Katana broke out their last bottle of Armazin left over from the party on Faraway. He basked.

Languorously he regaled them with his story (careful not to provide a semantically useful map of the mine) while leading them through the spooky dangers of his subterranean labyrinth. He dramatized every drip, every rockfall, every black pit, every ice floe, every perilous turn and shaft, his voice in no hurry to release his captive audience. He paused frequently to pontificate, knowing that, this time, they would listen to his wisdom. Until he revealed the location of the Martyr’s Cache, no one was going to be audacious enough to interrupt him or poke at him with sarcastic asides. He missed, of course, his lordly wig and ruffled cuffs but tried to make up for that lack of impressiveness with precise diction and a selected choice of obscurely appropriate words.

In time he ran out of delays and actually had to take them to the treasure. The journey was quicker than the telling of the discovery. Reverently they carried the box back through twisting vaults, out, and down over windswept boulder and ice to the inflated command bubble. A cursory analysis showed the sarsen stone slices to be symmetrically pitted on the front and backed by a thin film of plastic. It was a cheap, soft, tough plastic commonly used to preserve food for long voyages—not particularly heat or light or oxygen resistant but, underground in permafrost conditions, bathed in Zuml’s atmosphere, it was virtually indestructible, a useful backing for something as brittle as stone. Scogil scanned several million bits of the pit sequences into his fam and broke the code almost immediately. It was meant to be broken.

“A message?” asked the Hyperlord anxiously. “They wanted to tell us something?” he queried.

“It’s mathematics,” said Scogil.

“Mathematics?”

“They were all mathematicians, remember. What else would a group of mathematicians do when isolated from all contact with civilization? They would do mathematics.” Hi-ranimus felt a pride for his profession. “We are a clever bunch. I’m not surprised that a mere gaggle of prison guards couldn’t stop them.”

“Is it psychohistory?” Jama’s voice was on its tiptoes.

“It appears to be.” The large disk of the sun had set, and the light from the inflated arch of plump cylinders above them shimmered on the stone slice Scogil was examining.

“But that’s blasphemy!” protested Jama. “They are forbidden to publish! Are they hypocrites as well as scoundrels?”

Scogil grinned. “Fanatic volunteers condemned to be erased from history without even a heroic song to tell of their going probably don’t connect publishing with the hiding of their stone scrawlings in a mine whose probable fate is to be kneaded back into the crust of Zural E by the tidal interactions of Zural. Given time to think about it, even martyrs don’t want to die without at least a marker on their graves. The marker has to be there, read or not. What is a marker but that which distinguishes oneself from all the other quadrillions?”

“Will this enable us to wrest psychohistory away from the Pscholars and apply it to our own ends?” That was Hyperlord Kikaju Jama’s fondest hope. He was remembering that one of his dreams was to finance a group of mathists who would secretly re-create the basic principles of psychohistory.

Scogil, who had been elated by the find, was now sobering. “Probably not. What’s on these slices was doubtless advanced mathematics for its time. Today, who knows? Psychohistory is orders of magnitude more complicated than it was. Today’s Pscholars can read social nuances beyond the wildest dreams of the Founder. They can sense a revolt or an insurrection before the leaders of that insurrection are even bom. The Founder was able to set up his colony on Faraway certain that no one would notice its strategic importance. Today such a leveraged ploy would be impossible. Early abortion is routinely applied before even an obscure threat matures.” Fleetingly Hiranimus recalled Agander. In spite of the Oversee’s deftest applied mathematics, the Pscholars had noticed the direction of the Ulmat deviation and begun countermeasures before the discontent of the Ulmat peoples could be ramped up into a useful crisis.

High above the camp their orbiting Helmarian ship warned them of an impending storm. The archaeologists could have battened down and ridden it out, but the need was no longer there. They tossed the remains of the martyrs into the landing craft for a later dignified funeral while the life’s work of the martyrs, committed to lifeless stone, was packed reverently in shockproof containers. To obscure the recent visit, obvious traces of grave robbing were erased under fresh layers of blown sand. The storm would do the rest. Then the crowded craft returned to the mother ship. The expedition jumped away from Zural to a point in interstellar space far from nearby suns, drifting. The analysis continued.

Each slice of sarsen stone was scanned and input into standard templates readable by any common household manufacturum. Scogil saw such templates as seeds which would drift across the interstellar voids in countless numbers, each seed conveniently too small to be seen by the huge galactic army of Fellowship monitors. Still, the seeds would be useless until they dropped down and took root in the kind of fertile soils that the Pscholar’s monitors were all too able to detect and sterilize.

The Starmaster’s regular crew had many expertises but none was a psychohistorian. The Hyperlord worshiped mathematics, but his mathematical sophistication was hardly more developed than the runtime routines built into his fam—public school tricks like solving partial differential equations in his head. Katana revealed her skills only as she needed them. Nemia was a master of psychoquantronics with a good smattering of psychohistorical training leavened by contact with her grandfather, who was one of the best psychohistorians that the Oversee had ever produced. But it was Scogil who had been trained from his youth as a psychohistorian, and so it fell to him to be the first to make a deep excursion into the martyr’s legacy. Others of the Oversee would follow soon enough. If he assimilated it now, he would have the jump-start.

Scogil extracted the relevant binary message from slice after slice and ran them through a decoder and then a document assembler and, hence, into his fam’s memory. The total was too meaty to be digested in one watch or a hundred. He was a python who had swallowed a very large goat. To begin, he sampled extensively, wincing at the extreme differences between Founder and Oversee notations. In the years following the Founder’s first paper his secretive followers had never published their work except in popular propaganda format. Whatever psychohistory that Scogil knew had been developed independently by the Oversee using their own symbolism and definitions. He had to construct a routine in his fam to build an efficient translator for his subconscious, then task back to his browsing.

One theorem caught his mind’s eye—he and Mendor Glatim had spent the better part of a year working through its proof, refining and polishing the machinery for their teacher, who was mining tougher psychohistorical veins. The Martyr’s proof of essentially the same theorem from the Martyr’s Cache was elegantly simple, enragingly simple once Hiranimus understood the notation—and it was a proof more than two thousand years old!

Was there anything more like that? He cut into the document at random. Up flashed a mid-interregnum description of Faraway’s economy from the Founder’s extrapolation of

ancient Faraway’s future. Scogil backtracked and was goggled at the conceptual frame which held the fine details. The Oversee had never been able to cover a whole system with such finesse. It frightened him in an exhilarating way. He was a child who knew arithmetic and had stumbled upon an advanced calculus dissertation in his attic.

Sweet irony. The boy who had been dropped from file Oversee’s elite theoretical course because he wasn’t good enough was sitting here, commanding instant access to the most dangerous text in the Galaxy outside of Fellowship control. He loved it!